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Publications
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- Faculty Publications (990)
- August 2020 (Revised September 2020)
- Technical Note
Assessing Prediction Accuracy of Machine Learning Models
The note introduces a variety of methods to assess the accuracy of machine learning prediction models. The note begins by briefly introducing machine learning, overfitting, training versus test datasets, and cross validation. The following accuracy metrics and tools... View Details
- Article
Common Variants of the Oxytocin Receptor Gene Do Not Predict the Positive Mood Benefits of Prosocial Spending
By: Ashley V. Whillans, Lara B. Aknin, Colin Ross, Lihan Chen and Frances S. Chen
Who benefits most from helping others? Previous research suggests that common polymorphisms of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) predict whether people behave generously and experience increases in positive mood in response to socially-focused experiences in daily... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Does Spending Money on Others Promote Happiness? A Registered Replication Report
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Jason Proulx, Iris Lok and Michael I. Norton
Research indicates that spending money on others—prosocial spending—leads to greater happiness than spending money on oneself (e.g., Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008, 2014). These findings have received widespread attention because they offer insight into why people engage... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
What Can Economics Say About Alzheimer's Disease?
By: Amitabh Chandra, Courtney Coile and Corina Mommaerts
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) affects one in ten people aged 65 or older and is the most expensive disease in the United States. We describe the central economic questions raised by AD. While there is overlap with the economics of aging, the defining features of the... View Details
- July 2020
- Case
Mortgage Backed Securities and the Covid-19 Pandemic
By: Emil N. Siriwardane, Luis M. Viceira and Dean Xu
In April 2020, global financial markets were still reeling as the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly across the world. Global equity markets had initially fallen by 30% in response to the pandemic, and high-yield credit markets had dropped by nearly 20%. In contrast,... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
When Do Experts Listen to Other Experts? The Role of Negative Information in Expert Evaluations for Novel Projects
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Misha Teplitskiy, Gary Gray, Hardeep Ranu, Michael Menietti, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
The evaluation of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet literature suggests that this process is subject to inconsistency and potential biases. This paper investigates the role of information sharing among experts as the... View Details
- Article
Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity
By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Nick Haber and Daniel Yamins
World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal... View Details
- July 2020
- Article
The Role of Interdependence in the Microfoundations of Organization Design: Task, Goal, and Knowledge Interdependence
By: Marlo Raveendran (formerly Goetting), Luciana Silvestri and Ranjay Gulati
Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the... View Details
- July 2020
- Article
Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
We examine how changing the allocation of hiring decision rights in a multiunit organization affects employee-firm match quality, contingent on a unit’s circumstances. Our research site, a U.S. retail chain, switched from a decentralized hiring model (hiring by... View Details
- June 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Majid Al Futtaim Retail Geographic Expansion: Brick or Click?
By: Juan Alcácer and Alpana Thapar
This case illustrates the challenges that retailers face when they aggressively pursue geographical growth by expanding both their physical store network and their online presence. It features Majid Al Futtaim (MAF) Retail, a franchisee of Carrefour hypermarkets in the... View Details
- June 2020
- Teaching Note
Understanding the Brand Equity of Nestlé Crunch Bar
By: Jill Avery and Gerald Zaltman
Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 519-061 and 519-062. In early 2018, Nestlé announced the sale of its U.S. candy-making division and a select collection of twenty of its confectionery brands, including the Nestlé Crunch Bar, to Ferrero SpA for $2.8 billion. Under the... View Details
- 2021
- Conference Presentation
An Algorithmic Framework for Fairness Elicitation
By: Christopher Jung, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Logan Stapleton and Zhiwei Steven Wu
We consider settings in which the right notion of fairness is not captured by simple mathematical definitions (such as equality of error rates across groups), but might be more complex and nuanced and thus require elicitation from individual or collective stakeholders.... View Details
- June 2020
- Article
How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections
By: Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel
Accuracy and consistency are critical for inspections to be an effective, fair, and useful tool for assessing risks, quality, and suppliers—and for making decisions based on those assessments. We examine how inspector schedules could introduce bias that erodes... View Details
- June 2020
- Article
The Isolated Choice Effect and Its Implications for Gender Diversity in Organizations
By: Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios, Aneesh Rai and Katherine L. Milkman
We highlight a feature of personnel selection decisions that can influence the gender diversity of groups and teams. Specifically, we show that people are less likely to choose candidates whose gender would increase group diversity when making personnel selections in... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences
By: Anke Becker, Benjamin Enke and Armin Falk
This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors. To document... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google... View Details
- Article
The Price of Anarchy of Self-Selection in Tullock Contests
By: Hau Chan, David C. Parkes and Karim R. Lakhani
Crowdsourcing platforms operate by offering their clients the ability to obtain cost-effective solutions for their problems through contests. The top contestants with the best solutions are rewarded, and the submitted solutions are provided to the clients. Within the... View Details
- April 29, 2020
- Article
How Should We Allocate Scarce Medical Resources?
By: Max Bazerman, Regan Bernhard, Joshua D. Greene, Karen Huang and Netta Barak-Corren
Who should get a ventilator if there aren’t enough to go around? Research on decision making leads to three concrete guidelines that policy-makers and physicians can use to make fair choices when allocating scarce, life-saving resources. The key to making fair and... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Resource Allocation; Decision Making; Policy; Fairness; Ethics
- April 2020
- Teaching Note
Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community
By: Jill Avery
Teaching Note for HBS No. 519-022. Flush with cash from its Series C fundraise, cult beauty brand Glossier considers its next phase of growth, facing critical decisions on how to allocate its capital to support various marketing communications and distribution... View Details
Keywords: Digital Marketing; Crowdsourcing; CRM; Startup; Direct-to-consumer; DTC; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Customer Relationship Management; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Social Media; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; United States
- 2020
- Working Paper
On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout
By: Louis Kaplow and Scott Duke Kominers
Prominent theory research on voting uses models in which expected pivotality drives voters' turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. It is recognized, however, that such work is at odds with Downs's paradox: in practice, many individuals turn out for... View Details